Change Comes Little by Little
by Mayhem21
Summary: Stan worked on the portal for 30 years. Overtime, his mission has changed, little by little. But it will all be worth it in the end when he finally rescues his brother.


For the first few days and weeks, there's little change to the new pattern of Stan's life. Rip open the panels of the portal, look for signs of something being broken, dump different fluids into the tank labeled "Power", and see if he's found the miracle he needs to rescue his brother. Eat when he remembers to. Pass out in a corner huddled for warmth under his battered red jacket.

The first change comes after the first tour. After he's forced into a corner and he falls back at the one thing he's always been good at: lying. He lies about his name, his job, and about the random junk cluttering up Ford's home.

Over the next few months, he cleans up one of the rooms in the house and fills it with strange and bizarre things. Some are from Ford's freaky research, others are ones he makes up himself. And however crude the flyers are for the Murder Hut that he starts posting wherever he can, the strange little logging town he's living in now is desperate enough for entertainment that they do the job and bring regular customers through to watch his performance.

He hates how the tours take him away from the portal, away from rescuing Stanford, but the added distance eventually allows him to take a step back and make adjustments to his plan.

Three months after Stanford was lost, Stan breaks into the room above the portal.

The private study he finds is terrifying, a physical manifestation of how far his brother had fallen down the rabbit hole of insanity. Once he's made a thorough search for the other journals and anything else that might be of use, he locks the door behind him and swears to never go back in.

Six months in and a Stanley has adjusted his mission once more. The Murder Hut has morphed into the Mystery Shack and expanded into one of Ford's larger storage rooms. He's found a supplier to make cheap souvenirs with the crude question mark logo he dashed off late one evening and for the first time in his life, more cash is flowing into his pockets than out.

The remainder of his brother's frightening cache of alcohol gets drunk the first month he finishes in the black instead of in crippling debt. He'd always dreamed of finally being a success but this- the cost is too high. He'd go back to Columbia in an instant if it saved Stanford.

The next month, seven months after the Event, one of Rico's men catches up to him. There are no police in the forest, however, and Stan is able, just barely, to make this new problem go away.

He can't risk this happening again, though, not when Stanford is depending on him. With the help of the freaky copier (because of _course_ his brother's copier was a bundle of weirdness), Stanley Pines dies.

On the first anniversary of kicking his brother into an unknown hell, Stan drinks too much and stares too long at the cheap gun he'd bought in Vegas years ago. He loses an entire night's work and can't decide the next morning if not pulling the trigger was an act of bravery or cowardice.

Five years go by faster and slower than he realized. He's changed his routine again and his nights down in the basement are now spent reading and studying all the science he'd shunned as a child. Every textbook, quiz, and spiral of notes he can find have been relocated to the basement. Slowly, so very slowly, Stan is tracing his brother's footsteps, reading his textbooks and working his way through all the classes his brother took in college. There are nights when the numbers and concepts start to blur and run together in his head but he takes those frustrations out on a punching bag he stole from the new 24-hour gym that opened up in town.

It's not enough for him to copy down his brother's work. He has to know it, understand it. That's the only way he can relearn how to think like Ford so he finally find the missing journals and turn the damned portal back on.

The first decades wears down on him more than he ever thought it could. Each morning, he assumes the role of Mr. Mystery and cons the townsfolk and tourists alike out of every possible cent. The rest of the time, however, he expands his reluctant intellect. He adds new topics, ones outside his brother's expertise. The library refuses to buy the textbooks he needs to start learning mechanical and computer engineering but the librarians do, at least, find out which books suit his needs and make sure he has the phone number for the publisher so he can buy them himself.

Stan finds himself trying not to glare at the people around him when he shops for groceries. One of them, he's sure, is the assistant Ford found to shore up the gaps in his own intellect. The mysterious aide isn't mentioned in the lone journal Stan has all but memorized but he's found pages of notes and diagrams written in noticeably different handwriting. Too many notes for the writer to removed from the project. Someday, Stan swears to himself, he'll find out who helped build the cursed portal and find out once and for all how his brother ended up paranoid and alone.

After fourteen years, Stan starts to think he might actually be making progress towards rescuing Ford. He's still reading, still learning, but the wires and parts beneath the surface of the portal are starting to make sense. When he pries back the metal surface, he can determine which cords carry power and which ones run data. The gears and dials suddenly have a purpose besides frustrating him with their complexity.

He's taken up most the floor in the basement tracing how the machine works. He's making his own diagrams, his own notes now. Whenever he finishes a section, he tapes the finished drawings to his punching bag and burns them into his memory while working up a sweat.

On some level, he's finally starting to feel like he might actually succeed in bring Ford home.

Seventeen years following the disastrous fight with Ford, Stan leaves Gravity Falls for the first time.

The nephew he barely knows had called him, nearly out of his mind in fear and nerves. His girlfriend, now fiance, future wife, has gone into labor and Shermie is halfway around the world on some business trip. His mother, Stan's sister-in-law, is there but it's _twins_ , they're expecting _twins_ and his nephew doesn't know how to handle _twins_.

Family is the only thing that can blast Stanley out of Gravity Falls and he quickly packs a bag and jumps into the El Diablo to make the ten hour drive to Piedmont.

He arrives before the birth and his nephew and future niece-in-law are _young_ , far too young to be parents but they're still more with it than he'd been at their age. It's strange pretending to be Stanford to family but it helps that neither he nor Ford ever met _any_ of them face-to-face before.

His sister-in-law lets him hold the twins once their born and Stan's so very, very glad he's sitting when they're placed in his arms because he looses it. He loses his heart to those tiny babies and the world opens up to him in a way it hasn't been since long before the portal. The mistake that's been ruling his life for seventeen years takes on new meaning and when he finally forces himself to leave, he drives north with new resolve. His dear, darling great niece and nephew deserve Stanford and he swears he'll make that happen. He make sure they don't fall apart the way he and Ford did. He'll make up for his horrific mistake and ensure they have the great uncle they deserve, not the one they've ended up with.

It's just a few months after the twentieth anniversary of the portal accident when Stan accidentally hires a child to work at the Shack. His work on the portal has taken a strange turn and the sheer amount of _stress_ it's causing becomes obvious when he realizes a twelve-year-old has been sweeping the gift shop and changing light bulbs for at least a week.

Under the guise of sorting out the payroll, Stan discovers that his new handyman is named Soos and that coming to the Shack everyday after school has become the single most important thing in the world to the chubby child. Worst of all is the obvious worship he can see in Soos's eyes when he looks at him. Stan isn't anyone's role model and the idea of having someone, anyone besides Ford relying on him send actual cold chills down his spine.

He tries to fire Soos everyday for the next two weeks. But deep down, he has to admit that he's never wanted to be deliberately cruel and each time he gets close to sending Soos packing, he gets a horrible premonition of the tears and soul-crushing misery that would follow.

In the end, he keeps Soos on and teaches him how to repair the golf cart and run the cash register. He even finds himself stopping by the school for concerts and competitions. But only because he was bored and needed a break from the Shack and its secrets, he tells himself.

Twenty-one years have gone by and Stan finally admits to himself that maybe, just maybe, there were some mistakes in Ford's work.

The idea isn't new but he's been actively suppressing it for years when it finally refuses to be ignored any longer. There are just too many things going on beneath the surface of the portal that don't make sense. Wires that loop around themselves, power going to components that don't need it, little things here and there. If Stan were the suspicious type (and he is), he'd look at his hand-drawn diagrams, think back through the decades of forced study, and decide the errors were sabotage. None of them are big enough problems to prevent the portal from working but when added together, they could affect what happens once turned on. He hasn't been able to see the code that runs the machine since he can't get the control computer to turn on but he's found enough information elsewhere that he feels confident in his realization.

Now he just has to decide what in hell he should _do_ with this knowledge. And so for a year he dithers and distracts himself with the Shack and letters to his nephew about the young twins before accepting that it's time to step off the path Ford had made when building the portal.

Winter is the slowest time of the year for the Mystery Shack and once he's shooed Soos out the door with orders to stay home until after New Years, Stan digs out all his notes and diagrams and plasters them all over the living room. Surrounded by twenty-two years worth of study and sweat and tears, Stan starts sketching out the changes he needs to make to the portal.

The first set of alterations focus on correcting the vandalism. When he finally turns the portal on, he needs to be absolutely certain that it does what _he_ wants it to do and not what the unknown saboteur wants.

The second set of modifications take four years to design and these are focused on something that's worried him since he first started toiling over the portal: how to make sure the portal finds Ford and brings him home.

Stan adds biology and genetics to the topics he's been forced to master and twenty-six years following the Incident, he finally figures out how to get the portal to aim directly at his brother. He writes the aiming program by hand, stressing all the while that he _still_ doesn't know exactly what runs the portal. The only saving grace is that he has an infinite supply of the genetic data needed to find Ford.

He's still tweaking the software and building the hardware to aim and focus the portal when the phone rings thirty years after losing Ford. His nephew is on the other end of the line and he asks Stan if it's at all possible for him to watch the twins over the summer. They've had a rough time in middle school so far, he explains, they're becoming obsessed with video games and computers and for the first time in their lives, they seem to be drifting apart. There's more going on beneath his nephew's words but Stan's been conning the entire world for thirty years; reading the unspoken subtext is easy.

Stan isn't convinced that bringing the twins to Gravity Falls and all it's weirdness is a good idea but the thought of the niblings following in his and Ford's footsteps is even more frightening and he agrees to let them visit.

Mabel and Dipper are better and worse than Stan thought possible. Soos made the first crack in the years of loneliness and isolation that defined Stan's life but the twins utterly shatter it. He still disappears down in the basement every night but it's suddenly harder than ever before and he actually finds himself eager to get up every morning.

The twins are a painfully beautiful echo of himself and Ford at their age. Dipper has Ford's intellect and Mabel his own free spirit (as Ma used to put it). They aren't straight clones of the older Pines twins, though. He's seen the orderly lists and diagrams Mabel comes up with to implement her latest crazy idea and how sly and cunning Dipper can be in ways that remind him of himself.

For the first time in thirty years, Stan finds himself smiling and laughing for real and he has to force back the reminder that eventually summer would end and he'd be all alone once more.

Little Gideon is, at first, merely a rival for the attention (and cash) of his usual customers. The day the monster stole the Shack out from under him, however, became the second worst day in his life, second only to the night Ford vanished into a pool of burning light.

Soos ensures he and the kids aren't on the street but Stan finds he can barely function. The Shack and the secret basement have been nearly his entire focus for half his life and having that ripped away means he's lost a part of himself.

He spends the first full day after losing the Shack stumbling around worried and confused. In an awful way, this fits with the pattern of Stan's entire life: try try and try at something until it explodes in his face and takes out everything in a three mile radius.

The niblings, however, are more important than the Shack. More important that Ford, somehow, and he spends what's left of his collapsed fortune making sure they'll be safe. They look utterly heartbroken when he gives them their bus tickets but he forces himself to turn and walk away, certain in the knowledge that he's been revealed an utter loser to their young eyes.

It's a moment of personal triumph that evening when he finally figures out how Gideon had worked his con. Stan doesn't even remember to put on pants when he rushes out to take back the Shack. The little creep's biggest mistake was picking the son of a fake psychic to make his big rival. He'd literally grown up seeing how the racket worked.

In the end, Stans gets to have his cake and eat it, too. And add a heaping slice of peach cobbler on the side. He gets the Shack back, he gets revenge on Gideon, he gets Dipper and Mabel back-

 _He gets the missing journals._

Later, hidden deep beneath the Shack Stan will swear and curse as he tries to understand how _children_ had succeeded where he failed, but in the moment, he remains disciplined enough to scoop Journal 2 up off the ground without it being seen and then to remain composed when Dipper hands him number 3.

Late that night, for the first time in thirty years, the portal turns on. The journals have the startup sequence and passcodes he's been missing all this time and the idea of rescuing Ford shifts from "I will eventually do this" to "This is happening soon."

He copies the journal Dipper considers "his" (he knows the kid will eventually demand it back and damned if he didn't have more tenacity than Stan _and_ Ford at their worst) and tucks away number 2. The dead rise from the ground and are cast back down and it turns out there's even _more_ written in the journal than he thought.

Stan "borrows" the third journal and Dipper's blacklight over the next few consecutive nights and quickly decides that the invisible notes are his brother pushed to the utter fringes of his sanity. He finds himself wondering if perhaps he's also discovered who sabotaged the portal.

Weeks go by, the end of summer starts to loom in the distance, and suddenly everyone is busy. The niblings are running around playing illegal midnight games of minigolf, producing dramatic sock operas (pyrotechnics provide by StanCo!), and helping Soos get a date. Meanwhile, Stan is tearing through the control software for the portal, melding it to his altered hardware, and installing the aiming program.

The night of the annual Northwest summer ball provides him the perfect opportunity to slip over the county line and grab the barrels of radioactive waste he needs for the portal. The kids won't be back until far past their bedtime and the obsession the town had with the illustrious event meant literally no one would be on hand to catch him moving the toxic sludge.

The niblings get home well past midnight. They're so tired Stan thinks he could have still been wearing his protective rubber suit and they wouldn't have noticed. Stan places Mabel's nightgown in her hands and orders her to change while he pulls Dipper out of the attic bedroom and helps him out of the fancy tux he'd come home in.

When Mabel sleepily calls out that they can come back in, Stan finds his grandniece moments away from falling asleep. She'd managed to change into her nightgown but she's still wearing her weird hat thing, her face is still covered in makeup, and she's still wearing her earrings and fancy shoes.

After tucking Dipper into bed, Stan pads back downstairs to get a warm washcloth from the bathroom and returns, carefully wiping Mabel's face clean. He unpins the fuzzy hat-thing and puts her earrings on the bedside table. The shoes get tossed onto a nearby pile of sweaters and Stan tucks her into bed safe and warm.

Task complete, Stan turns off the overhead light and retreats to his worn-out armchair downstairs. He knows he should get to bed himself but he's simply too keyed up. He rotates his wrist to look at the countdown ticking away. In just a few hours, everything was going to change.


End file.
